“Everything about the Premier League becomes more difficult every year,” Brighton & Hove Albion owner and chairman Tony Bloom tells The Athletic, speaking at the club’s training ground.
“We have to always look to improve and innovate. If we stand still — and this is talked about in a lot of businesses, but is particularly true in football, and particularly in the Premier League — our competitors are fiercely competitive, and they are looking to overtake us. They are trying to get stronger all the time, so we have to do likewise, and ideally we’re going ahead even faster than the other teams.”
There can be no denying Brighton’s incredible progress since Bloom first took over the club in 2009. They had just finished 16th in League One — English football’s third tier — when Bloom arrived in the boardroom, but in the eight years that followed, they won two promotions and a place in the Premier League, and moved into both a state-of-the-art training facility and their now-famous Amex Stadium.
The hallmark of Brighton’s spell in the Premier League has been innovative thinking — be that in the transfer market or when appointing new managers. This vision has helped keep the club punching above their weight and regularly overcoming opponents with far bigger budgets, and has also secured Bloom’s status as one of the most respected minds in the game.
Here, he shares with The Athletic his views on football governance, the increasing American influence on the Premier League, and the possibility of competitive games being played overseas.
Bloom does not hold back on the future for the Premier League after spending by clubs in the 2025 summer transfer window topped £3billion for the first time.
“It’s getting to that point where the revenues of the league are going up at a certain rate and transfer fees and salaries are going up at a higher rate,” he tells The Athletic. “So there’s an element of unsustainability there, which is why the rules we’re going to be voting on soon are really important. Because it will only end in disaster if the losses sustained by clubs go up at an even faster rate.”
The vote Bloom refers to is the Premier League’s latest attempt to stop clubs spending beyond their means following the UK government’s recent appointment of an independent football regulator to protect and promote the sustainability of English football. Clubs will vote at their next meeting in November on whether to replace the current profit and sustainability Rules (PSR) with squad cost rules (SCR).
PSR allows for losses of up to £105million over a three-year period. Under the League’s SCR proposal, clubs will be allowed to spend up to 85 per cent of their overall football revenues. There will also be a vote on anchoring the spend to no more than five times the lowest TV revenue for a club. The idea is to align with UEFA’s financial fair play (FFP) regulations — SCR was added to the European governing body’s rules in 2022.
Everton fans protest their club’s PSR points deduction in November 2023 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Brighton are yet to decide how they will vote. “The advantage of the squad cost ratio is it’s more real-time,” says Bloom. “It’s looking over a season, rather than looking backwards over a three-year period. But there are pros and cons of both. So we really are looking at it in detail. No system is perfect. We want to get the best possible system. They are hugely complicated rules, but they are trying to make them as reasonable as they possibly can.
“Each club is not going to like every part of it. It’s whether, as a whole, the Premier League clubs think that the changes make the league better and more sustainable as an overall product. What is really important — and why the Premier League is so popular — is that, even though you’ve got some clubs with huge resources and some of the best teams in the world, on any given day, the bottom few teams can beat them.
“So the gap between top and bottom is somewhat competitive. And if that gap grows too much, the interest in the Premier League will go down and the revenues of the Premier League will go down and that will not just affect the Premier League teams, it will affect all the teams going down the pyramid. So that for me is paramount and that’s the sort of level of detail that I’ll be looking at to make sure that will continue for decades to come.”
Bloom speaks from a position of strength as he discusses with The Athletic what lies in store for the Premier League at Brighton’s training headquarters in Lancing, West Sussex. He runs a tight but profitable ship. Brighton’s combined pre-tax profit over the past two seasons was a whopping £208.4m. The figures fluctuate, depending on player trading from year to year, but Brighton have never been in danger of breaching PSR regulations, unlike clubs such as Everton, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle. The former pair were hit by points deductions, while Newcastle’s £30m sale of Gambian winger Yankuba Minteh to Brighton in the summer of 2024 was born of necessity to stay within the rules.
Bloom has no sympathy for rivals affected by PSR. “You don’t have to agree to the rules,” he says. “You don’t have to have voted for them. If the league votes rules in, you have to abide by them. No competition can continue if people flout the rules, so people should stick to the rules and if they don’t, there needs to be consequences.
“We don’t want anyone to break the rules. Everyone knows what they are and in PSR it’s a three-year rolling amount you can lose of £105million that doesn’t include things like the academy, the women’s team and any infrastructure projects. It’s a huge amount of money and so if clubs go over it, there need to be the consequences.
“There’s a lot of media talk about it not working because it forces clubs to sell homegrown players. That’s really false. You don’t have to sell homegrown players. You just need to organise your finances in a way that you are not at risk about going over the limit. That’s fallacious arguments which I’ve heard quite a lot. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Self-interest plays a big part in the way every club acts and votes. In Brighton’s case, that means trying to reach Europe again (they did so for the first time in 2022-23) and winning the club’s first major silverware after finishing ninth, sixth, 11th and eighth in the table over the past four seasons. These are extra layers in chief executive Paul Barber’s ‘2030 vision’ for the club, revealed by The Athletic in September. Staying competitive at the top end of the table while spending only what you can afford is increasingly challenging for Bloom. The 55-year-old sports betting entrepreneur has invested over £400m into his boyhood club.
Tony Bloom with Brighton chief-executive Paul Barber at Wolves in May 2025 (Chris Brunskill/Getty Images)
“The finances are really tough,” he says. “The club is spending more and more money. The net spend of our competitors just keeps going up. If you look at our net spend over the last five years compared to our rivals, we are spending a lot less. Most clubs lose significant sums of money.
“There is a financial madness. And it’s not just in this country, it’s in most countries. I know that football clubs as a whole will lose some money, because it’s so competitive by nature. But the amount of money that some clubs are willing to lose season upon season makes no sense to me.
“We want to be a sustainable football club. We will have seasons where we lose a lot of money, as well as some seasons we make a lot of money. But over time, if we stay in the Premier League, we will be sustainable and we will be profitable. Most of our rivals not. So it’s really tough to compete with that. And the very biggest clubs, their commercial revenues, their stadium revenues, are so much bigger than ours.”
Bloom is more positive about the growth of US ownership in the Premier League. Eleven of the 20 clubs Premier League clubs are now owned or controlled by Americans. Bloom, born in Brighton and a lifelong fan of the club, is in the minority. It has made no discernible difference to the dynamics at Premier League meetings, other than highlighting the shift.
“I’m aware that there are very few British owners,” Bloom says. “In an ideal world, there would be more, but we know how difficult it is and the deep pockets that a lot of the owners have and there’s less opportunities, unless you get promoted, for there to be British-owned teams in the Premier League, which I think is a shame. But that is just the way things are. There are opportunities with that. It is totally global, a huge international audience. The Premier League is just going from strength to strength.”
Bloom wants the Premier League to tap into what he sees as a benefit of the influx of US owners. “We need to embrace new ideas,” he says. “Some American sports are excellent at marketing. The fan experience is superb. Our fan experience is also great, but there are just different ideas we can bring. You’ve got to be a bit careful, because football is different to other sports. The spectator experience in America and their expectations are quite different.
“Here, everything in football is 90 minutes, very intense. Baseball, for example, is more of a day out. So we’ve got to be a bit careful that we don’t water down the experience of the fans. I think getting the best bits from America, some of their innovative experiences, could be positive going forward.”
Although Bloom recognises the advantages of broadening the Premier League’s global appeal, he is against following in the footsteps of Spain’s La Liga and Serie A in Italy in taking games abroad. UEFA have reluctantly agreed to matches between Barcelona and Villarreal in Miami this December, and Milan against Como in Perth, Australia in February.
Bloom doesn’t want Brighton games to go the way of Barcelona vs Villarreal (Joan Gosa/Getty Images)
“I’m not in favour of Premier League games abroad,” Bloom says. “I like the system where you play 19 games at home, 19 games away. The Premier League is becoming bigger and better every season, more and more popular. Other leagues perhaps are falling behind to some extent. We don’t need to do that to create more noise and create more fans. We can do that within the existing system.”
Like America, Bloom’s influence in the game is also spreading. He has minority stakes in top-flight clubs in Belgium (Union Saint-Gilloise), Scotland (Heart of Midlothian) and Australia (Melbourne Victory), but refutes being labelled as a multi-club owner. USG ended a 90-year wait to become Belgian champions again last season. They top the current domestic standings, as do Hearts, disrupting the traditional stranglehold of Glasgow-based clubs Celtic and Rangers.
“I’m delighted with Union’s success,” Bloom says. “It’s a brilliant story. And I’m really excited about Hearts, over time, being successful in Scotland. But all the clubs run very independently, so it’s not a multi-club ownership at all. They are all individual football clubs, run on their own merits in very different ways.” Bloom says he has no plans to further expand his football empire, despite being linked to clubs in France and Greece.
He reduced his stake in USG to 25 per cent in the summer of 2023 to comply with UEFA rules on multi-club ownership after Brighton and USG qualified to play in the Europa League in 2023-24. Rivals Crystal Palace were demoted from the Europa League to the UEFA Conference League this season because of breaching multi-club ownership rules. Former shareholder John Textor was deemed to have a decisive influence in Palace and Europa League participants Lyon from France.
The BlueCo consortium’s ownership of Chelsea and French club Strasbourg and their trading links are causing controversy. Bloom’s attitude is the same as it is for club finances — abide by the regulations. “The multi-club model over the last few years is growing and growing,” he says. “So it’s up to UEFA to manage that. They’ve got rules in place. There were rules in place when Brighton and Saint-Gilloise were both playing the Europa League. And so everyone just needs to stick to the rules.”
Brighton’s recruitment model, based on Bloom’s secret algorithm, is their route to a competitive edge over their rivals. The process of sourcing gems at low cost, developing them and then selling for big profits has to keep on evolving for the club to keep on progressing.
In September, Jason Ayto was appointed as sporting director at Brighton in place of technical director David Weir. The combination of the 40-year-old former Arsenal assistant and interim sporting director and 32-year-old first team manager Fabian Hurzeler provides a young and dynamic environment in key positions.
“I don’t know exactly what other clubs are doing — they don’t necessarily talk about it — but you can assume they’re spending a lot of time to try to improve in all areas, particularly the areas of analytics in terms of their recruitment processes,” Bloom says. “So we have to innovate and we just aim to get better every season.
Brighton turned big profits on Yves Bissouma and Moises Caicedo (Matthew Ashton/Getty Images)
“Jason’s been in football for a long time, been at Arsenal for a very long time. He had the interim sporting director role for nine months and did a really good job. He came very close to getting the full-time sporting director role at Arsenal. He’s just got the skill set, we believe, in many different areas.
“He’s seen, working for Edu at Arsenal, how things work there. He can bring so many different experiences. He’s a great man manager in different areas. In a sporting context, a football club requires a lot of different skills, and we believe that Jason has that.”
The global data bank continues to grow as more clubs follow a similar recruitment path. Brighton have 22 nationalities in their squad, the highest number in the Premier League. Bloom says: “We are looking for the best possible players; the right type of player, the age profile, the money. So we don’t care where it is, hence we have huge amounts of nationalities in the building.
“The way we recruit always starts with the data and we’re always looking to improve the level of data, the level of understanding of that data. So that hasn’t changed and that won’t change. It’s a hugely important element, but there’s a lot which goes on in addition to the data and in addition to using it in even better ways. And there’s always ways to improve the way we’re doing things.
“We absolutely can sustain it, but we know it’s not at all simple and therefore we never rest on our laurels and we don’t lose sight of the difficulty of what we’re trying to do season after season.”
Brighton sold Moises Caicedo to Chelsea for £115million in 2023. Their record buy is nowhere near that — £40m for Georginio Rutter from Leeds in the summer of 2024. As prices continue to rocket, will they ever be in the market for a £100m player? “I can’t foresee that at all,” Bloom says. “Inflation means it will happen eventually, but I’m not sure I’ll be around at that point.”